"To be or not to be" is no longer the question for Jessie, one of the two characters in Marsha Norman's 1983 Pulitzer Prize winning drama, "'Night, Mother" — an absorbing "mother/daughter" play that is currently being given an artfully crafted and emotionally stirring production at CoHo Theatre.

Having struggled with debilitating epilepsy, an unfortunate divorce and a son who has slipped into a life of crime, Jessie has decided, ironically and perhaps not irrationally, now when it looks like she's gotten control of her illness and actually feels reasonably well, that she has had enough of this life.

Early in this long one-act play, Jessie announces to her mother Thelma, with whom she is currently living, that she intends to shoot herself that evening. The rest of the play follows Thelma's efforts to somehow prevent Jessie's self-annihilation.

Certainly, the stakes of the play's conflict are high, but even more disturbing are the controversial questions that Norman challenges her audience to ponder: Is suicide ever an appropriate response to the problems of life? Does an individual have the moral right to end his/her life? Is suicide a legitimate way of exerting control over one's life?

Highlights: Neither the play nor the CoHo production offer final answers to these difficult questions, but what we do get from this production is a keen sense of the reality of Norman's two characters. Not only do the two actresses, Jacklyn Maddux as Thelma and Dana Millican as Jessie, each with wavy reddish blond hair, look like mother and daughter but they are wonderfully attuned to each other on stage.

Most valuable performers: Both Maddux and Millican offer finely drawn and deeply felt performances. In his professional directorial debut, Gavin Hoffman, himself an able actor, has worked with Maddux and Millican to shape carefully charted complex arcs for each of the two characters.

Millican may seem a bit perfunctory in her relation to her mother at the start of the play — her announcement of her imminent death may seem abrupt as she desperately tries to stay on track moving through the list of items that she needs to address with her Mother before she departs. Still, under the pressure of Maddux's Thelma, we can see the controlled façade crack.

Even more, any suspicion we might have that her announcement is more of a call for help than the revelation of an actual plan of action is dispelled when we see Millican's portrayal of Jesse's eventual frustration at her mother's reaction to her announcement. Millican adeptly conveys Jesse's belief that her mother's response is just another example of how Jesse screws up everything in her life — even her own death.

Maddux vividly portrays Thelma's shifting from tactic to tactic in her effort to ward off Jesse's death — aggressively pressuring Millican's Jesse but also trying to excite Jesse's pity or more slyly trying to gently cajole Jesse back into life — but she also takes us on a journey through the various stages of grief. We see her move from shocked disbelief, to a glaring-eyed anger, to a desperate dance of bargaining with the inevitable, to the crushed stillness of depression, and finally to a last explosive futile outburst followed by a very unsettled, emotionally wrought resignation.

Line of the night: Jessie: "... I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it."

Best moments: There is a moment towards the end of the play when Millican's Jesse and Maddux's Thelma are leaning over the kitchen counter face to face shrieking at each other. It is the moment when Thelma inadvertently admits that she wished Jesse had left a suicide note rather than forcing her to confront her own inability to dissuade Jesse from the ultimate act. This moment is soon followed by the tenderest scene in the play. Millican's Jesse soothingly caresses her mother while they sit side by side on the sofa. This scene immediately preceding the final climax represents the all so gentle calm of the eye of the storm which is soon to break again with all its emotional power. The carefully orchestrated rhythmic changes in these last scenes are wonderfully well executed.

Biggest surprise: Even if one knows the play, the final climactic moments are still a sorrowful surprise.

Low note: This is a very minor detail. Though Tal Sanders' scenic design representing Thelma and Jesse's living room and kitchen very successfully captures a sense of the comfortable lower middle class world of the house's inhabitants, the upstage center door leading to Jesse's room — the door behind which Jesse promises to shoot herself, a door which holds a somewhat magical power over the action — seems surprisingly flimsy especially when Thelma is confronted by it at play's end.

Takeaway: In the 1980s when "'Night, Mother" was first produced, it sparked controversy among feminists — some thinking that Jesse's final actions represented an empowerment others believing quite the opposite. Now, to a great extent, the play transcends the feminist issues of the 1980s. Whatever one may think about suicide or feminist concerns, it is — thanks especially to Hoffman's direction and the acting of Maddux and Millican — hard not to be moved by this CoHo production.